South Africa has a very eager and vibrant entrepreneurial spirit and community. This is fortunate because if we are ever to make an impact on the massive requirement for job growth in this country, it is from small and medium enterprises (SME’s) that it must come.
Recently Statistics South Africa revealed that South Africa had lost approximately 260,000 jobs in the second quarter of 2018. The unemployment rate is at a 15-year high of 27% and our economy hasn’t grown at more than 2% since 2013. Against this backdrop, how can we ensure that SME’s survive, grow and thrive?
The 80:20 rule and what it means for business
The 80:20 rule is also known as the Pareto Principle or the law of the vital few. It states that 80% of your results come from just 20% of your actions and it can be applied to many factors such as time management, sales and marketing.
Applied to various industries, this power packed idea has enabled radical transformation of the status quo:
- The computer revolution took off when developers realised that we only use 20% of the functions of a PC and created RAM to load these faster.
- The Japanese manufacturing industry dominated the world in the 1970s after they decided to first tackle the few processes 20% causing 80% of the defects, in other words they realised that not all issues were equal and focussed their attention allowing their quality and sales to soar.
Business consultant Paul Dalton comments. “I found that there is much info out there on defining the 80:20 principle and its effects but it’s difficult to find any practical advice on how to apply the rule to a business,” he says. “So I’ve spent ten years of my life dedicated to documenting, deploying and measuring the effects of specific actionable insights from the 80:20 rule.”
Dalton has designed a simple three-step approach towards creating a profitable business, borrowed from the lessons of 80:20 rule.
Start by looking internally and unlock cash first
One of the most powerful insights to come out of the 80:20 rule is that one in five of your existing clients is willing and able to pay you four times more right now, for the right value. This is a universal truth that businesses simply don’t extract all available cash from existing clients, products and services.
Either your clients don’t know the full extent of your services and so only buy a little of what you offer or their landscape has changed and you haven’t revisited them to ask if they need more from you. Either way, you’re leaving money on the table.
A simple revisit to your existing client base could yield an extra 20-30% turnover in a matter of weeks. What’s great about this nugget of wisdom is that the expense is way less than marketing for new clients and most business can accommodate another 20% in sales without incurring more fixed costs, so this little gem of an exercise should make the gross profit drop straight to the bottom line.
Move towards more profitable products and services
The next step is way more strategic. Again, using the 80:20 rule and applying it to our offerings, we’ll find that 80% of our real profits come from just 20% of our product or service mix.
If we investigate our product offering and mix, as well as opportunities within and adjacent to the existing business such as new products that are currently under exploited, we can start to map the true (net) profitability of each of the products within the business and then we simply move the focus for of our activities towards these more profitable products.
Everything you do is not equal in terms of profitability and some things are wildly more profitable. You need to find them and focus upon them.
Finally, scale up with your new profitable commercial model
The 80:20 rule shows us that big clients tend to be less profitable. This is because we give them discounts, usually because they demand them and we can’t say no. They increase complexity by asking for stuff that’s not on our shelves and they often keep our staff busy running around for them. This erodes profitability.
Clients further down the scale are much more profitable and this is the sweet spot. When we craft a strategy for finding more of these types of customers, we should dramatically increase our profits without radically increasing the turnover or the costs, expenses and stress that come al